Veryuk

Driving Results with a Tech-savvy Audience

Client

The Story

The online retailer generated millions of personalized Dynamic Ads that yielded £1.7 million in incremental revenue through a customized strategy and technical implementation from Facebook’s Solutions Engineering team.

An intuitive shopping experience

Launched in 2009, Very is an online department store in the UK that offers intuitive, stylish but accessible shopping. With over £850 million in sales in 2015, it’s now Shop Direct’s biggest brand.

The Goal

Customizing for scale

Very needed a customized advertising solution that could scale to deliver highly personalized ads based on the tens of thousands of products it offers. The retailer’s challenge was to reach young, tech-savvy women whose path to purchase typically spans multiple devices.

"As a technology, Dynamic Ads supports Very’s ambitions for growth and personalization perfectly, because of the way their target audience browses and buys. But with a 60,000+ product inventory, it was important to fine-tune the approach and make sure that each link in the chain was working properly." - Jordan Rogers-Smith, Facebook Solutions Engineering

“Facebook helped us devise and orchestrate a strategy across all parts of the Dynamic Ads process, making sure that each element of the campaign was working effectively.”

Jonathan Wall, eCommerce Director, Shop Direct

The Solution

Packaging best practices

To drive and track conversions across devices, Very’s marketing and CRM teams, Marketing Partner Kenshoo and tag manager Qubit worked with Facebook’s Solutions Engineering to fully implement a Dynamic Ads strategy that could then be simplified, accelerated and replicated over time.

The Solutions Engineering team used the results of its first Dynamic Ads campaign to identify weaknesses and potential improvements in its strategy and technical implementation. Then, the team developed a set of best practices that would underpin the entire project and would provide Very the insight it needed to run its own campaigns autonomously.

One of the biggest challenges was ensuring that tags for all 62,000 items in the campaign’s product catalogue were implemented correctly and were generating the correct data; for example, adjusting the system so prices rendered in GBP rather than default USD.

During its test run, Solutions Engineering took care to identify and educate Very on how to avoid such potential glitches and took the following strategic steps to optimize Very’s initial campaign for best results:

Broke up the overall product catalogue into categories, with messaging and bidding tailored to each category.

Set up audiences based on the amount of time it took them to act on an ad, with bidding adjusted to favor those who acted first.

Successful implementation

Very’s Dynamic Ads strategy and implementation developed by Facebook Solutions Engineering enabled the retailer to reach 1.6 million customers, prompting the client to increase its Dynamic Ads spend on this initiative by up to 10X. The campaign also delivered the following results: